Louis Desjardins wrote: > You're absolutely right, there is no room for confusion while using > the styles. When in the Style Manager, the user can apply a keyboard > shortcut to any style or leave it like that. If the user choose not > to apply any keyboard shortcut, the only way to access the style will > be through the Style Manager dialog (or palette) with mouse clicks. > One click, one style. When a keyboard shortcut is applied, then this > style can be applied with a keystroke. Whether the keystroke will > have an effect or not depends on the context. One shortcut, one style. > > Case: > 1. You have set 3 Paragraph Styles for Main Title, Lead Paragraph and > Body Text, Main Title. > 2. You have given these 3 styles keyboard shortcut 1, 2 and 3 on the keypad. > 3. You have set 3 Frame Styles for Main Title, Lead Paragraph and Body Text : > a) Large Frame that covers the width of the page, with a height of 3 > cm within the margins, one column. > b) Frame covering 2 column width plus the gap, for Lead Paragraph, > with a height of 6 cm, one column. > c) Large frame covering the width and height of the page, within the > margins, set to 5 columns. > 4. You give Frame Style a b c the following keyboard shortcut 4, 5 > and 6 on the keybad. > > Now, when you're on a page with no object selected, if you hit keypad > 1 2 or 3, nothing will happen. If you hit keypad 4,5 or 6, a text > frame correspondind to your Frame Style will be created. > In order for styles attributed to shortcut 1, 2 or 3 to work, you > need to first select a Text Frame. > > I think the "nothing happening" is consistent with other features of Scribus which depend on a frame being selected. One other question might be whether there should be an indicator on the toolbar that shows when the feature is active (frame selected), then greyed out when a frame is not selected. > We could also set other Frame Styles for Images. Say for instance you > have a magazine with 3 columns. Pics can be 1-column wide, 2-column > or 3 column. For each, you can set a Frame Style with these > pre-defined coordinates. Attribute to these the shortcuts 7, 8 and 9. > You expect Scribus to create an image frame once you hit one of these > 3 shortcuts. > > To create a Frame using the Style manager follows the same rules that > you have to follow to draw any frame. You need to have a page in > front of you. A Frame can be created on the page, within another > frame or beside it. It doesn't matter. > > Same goes for Line Style or for any style. There cannot be any mix up > because the same keystroke cannot call two different styles. If you > need more keys, then you need to have a combination of Shift+Keypad > or CTRL+Keypad, etc. Of course a power user will prefer to set the > first keys available to the more repetitive tasks, leaving the other > for less used styles. Provided the context is favorable for the Style > to be applied, then the shortcut works. It's like hitting any key on > the keyboard: it works only if the working conditions are met. > > If we are to have Image Style, this could only apply to an existing > image within an Image Frame. If you hit the shortcut that is > connected to an Image Style when you are editing text, then nothing > will happen. > > In my office, we use those keypad shortcut everyday. In Quark, we are > limited to Text Styles (paragraph and character styles). The keyboard > is the fastest way to get things done (the mouse is really slow, we > all know that). I can only see that implementing this in Scribus will > definitely make it a very robust production tool. Expanding it to > many other styles (Line, Characters, Frames, etc.) will make Scribus > roar! :) > > One of the things that keeps me using Wordperfect is macros. There are many things in which it is convenient to assign a name to an arbitrary series of operations. I'm not sure if you still can, but you used to be able to assign a keyboard shortcut to a particular macro. This might be something else to weave into this frame styles concept.
Greg
